Television displays a stream of program segments, sometimes including commercial messages, to users/viewers. This information is received by the television by any number of well known transmission methods including: direct broadcast, cable, fiber optics, etc.
In some of the prior art, some control of the programming is given to the user. For example, there are "pay per view" features in certain cable television networks that provide a particular program to a television viewer only if the viewer agrees to pay for the program, either as a periodic subscription or as a per use payment. Certain subscription services provide specific types of programming (e.g. nature or children's programming) or programming with a limited number or no commercial messages.
In certain information processing systems, e.g., a video recorder, devices can be controlled by characteristics of the signal itself. For example, a dark screen occurring in a television program being recorded indicates that a commercial is about to begin (end) and that the record speed of the video recorder should be slowed down (sped up).
However, in much of the prior art, there is a limited amount of automatic control that the user has over his television based on the content of the information being received by the television. Therefore, there is a need for an improved way to control the content outputted by a television (either to the television monitor and/or to an attached processing device like a video recorder) in standard television programming that is based on the content of the information that is being received by/sent to the television.